600 NATIONAL OiCEANOGRAPHIC PROGRAM LEGISLATION 



As a source of minerals, the sea has been little exploited relative to its poten- 

 tial. The major reasons for this default are, I believe, a lack of dissemination 

 of the limited knowledge concerning what is in the ocean in the way of mineral 

 deposits and the absence of a proven technology to exploit the deposits on an 

 economic basis. Whereas we have at our disposal all the equipments and tech- 

 nologies necessary to gather adequate information concerning the deposits and 

 their environments, very little has been done in this regard. In fact, the Bureau 

 of Mines' marine mineral program has been directed away from this very goal. 

 As you are aware, the Subcommittee on the Department of the Interior and 

 Related Agencies of the House Committee on Appropriations has -stated that it 

 sees no need for the Bureau to engage in marine mineral resource evaluations. 

 No publicly sponsored U.S. oceanographic expedition has ever devoted any of 

 its time to the search for economic mineral deposits in the sea. The meager 

 information that we do possess has been gleaned as a byproduct of scientific 

 studies concerning the sediments of the ocean floor. From these gleanings, how- 

 ever, we have obtained samples of what seem to be extremely rich mineral de- 

 posits which apparently cover great areas of the ocean floor. Based on these 

 sparse data, considering the sea's vast extent, it is possible to say that the pres^ 

 enitly available mineral deposits of the sea could easily supply the population of 

 the earth with its total consumption of manganese, nickel, cobalt, copper, phos- 

 phorus, limestone, common salt, magnesium, bromine, fluorine, potassium, boron, 

 sulfur, aluminum, and various other less important minerals as well as supplying 

 substantial portions of its consumption of iron ore, lead, zinc, titanium, molyb- 

 denum, uranium, zirconium, and so on. 



Many of these materials are strategic for the United States, while others are 

 obtainable only at exorbitant prices from limited conJtinental sources. 



Because the sea is the utlimate repository for most of the continent's wastes, 

 human as well as natural, it is continuously receiving a tremendous influx of 

 material. The rivers of the world alone dump some 4 billion tons of mineral 

 material into the sea annually. Bather than depositing these materials in the 

 indiscriminate form in which they are received, the sea acts as a great chemical 

 retort, working on a truly grand scale to separate and concentrate those elements 

 it receives from the continents. Many of the resulting mineral deposits would 

 be considered extraordinarily high-grade if on land. We find in the ocean, 

 deposits of manganese nodules, measured in the billions of tons, which grade 

 as high as 2.5 percent of copper, 2 percent of nickel, 0..3 i)ercent of cobalt, 3-5 

 percent of manganese, as v,^ell as containing economically si.gnificant quantities 

 of lead, zinc, molybdenum, etc., all in the same deposit. On land such a deposit 

 normally would be considered ore-grade if it contained like amounts of any one 

 of these elements. Other deposits of the nodules grade as high as 2.1 percent 

 of cobalt or 51 percent of manganese. The reserves of metals in the nodules 

 now speculated to be lying at the surface of the sediments of the ocean, and, 

 economically minable, are measured in terms of thousands of years at our present 

 rates of consumption. More interesting is the observation that many of these 

 metals are annually agglomerating in the nodules at rates that gi'eatly exceed 

 our annual consumption of these materials. And this renewable feature, we 

 have found, is a very common attribute of many of the mineral deposits of the 

 sea, whereas, on land, the mineral deposits are generally considered wasting 

 assets and totally nonrenewable. 



Although our studies are not backed up with operating experience, save for the 

 mining of near shore submerged placer deposits, these studies indicate that we 

 could produce many important indiistrial minerals from the sea at fractions of 

 the cost of winning these metals from continental deposits. Also we would 

 experience a tremendous increase in our capital utilization efficiency for a deep 

 sea mining system that could produce annually .$250 million worth of copper, 

 nickel, cobalt, manganese, etc., would involve a capital investment of only about 

 $100 million, v/hereas, on land, a mine to produce about $100 million worth of 

 products annually would normally involve a capital investment of about $250 

 million. Then, too. many of the materials we could recover from the sea are 

 strategic minerals for the United States not only militarily, but iwlitically and, 

 certainly, economically. For the United States could temper its dollar drain 

 by at least $1.2 billion annually by extracting metals from the ocean floor 

 deposits rather than buying them from foreign nations as we now must. Also, 

 we could utilize many of the new technologies for processing the ocean floor 

 minerals that have been developed at great expense by the AEG for the process- 

 ing of domestic uranium deposits and by the Bureau of Mines for processing 



